OBJECT OVERVIEW 1.5

What we did is – almost – quick and easy to explain. The object overview looks trivial and simple, but it is not. It consists of several tools and must be able to process, sort and display thousands of objects. To make matters more complicated, each object can have different information requirements for each collector. This means that our object overview has to do a lot more to do than most of the websites you know. COLLECTORBASE.net can do much more than regular websites and other collections databases, and that means more data that needs to be processed.

Although most of this happens on our server, which we will soon replace with a much faster one, showing and representing the many objects happens in your browser. The problem now is that your browser is not designed for such datasets. The browser is designed to be able to display simple web pages, not highly spec’d collection database results! (That is also the reason why in a Google search or on Amazon the results are divided into pages. And they have much less data to process. But the effect is the same).

WE ONLY PARTIALLY PRE-LOAD THE DATA FOR THE OBJECT OVERVIEW!

For the sorted results, we need all the data from the search result. We cannot bypass that. Through the sorting you will see your search result. This is a very small data set compared to the object display. The display of the objects themselves, however, is computationally and data volume-wise intensive. Therefore, it takes quite a while until you can view 2000 objects. Or 5000. Or….

Who wants to display 2000 objects, you may ask now? You’d be surprised! Everyone who explores our collection database see what it is possible to do and just wants to take a trip through our collection database. Or maybe it’s someone who wants to see their entire collection.

For browsers, such amounts of data are too much. You can get an error message and crash the site. Of course, we do not want that, so we have set a display maximum of 2000 objects. Modern browsers can just handle this. JUST. Therefore if you get a message saying you can only be shown 2000 objects, please make a further selection on the search.

But this isn’t ideal. We have to go another way.

WE HAVE SPLIT THE DATA

We have split the data for the search result. There is now a small record for sorting and one for object display. In addition, we only give your browser the data for the object display in small bites of 50 objects. If you want to load more, you just have to click on “load more objects” and the next 50 objects will come along.

Or you can use the search to sort of more specific results and see from your search result exactly what you want to see.

The 50 objects are not fixed. We will use the forum to find out the optimal number of objects in the near future.

12,000 OBJECTS IN ONE SECOND

With this data split and these changes, we can display 12,000 objects within one second!

These changes will also affect our presentation, which will soon get a new look.

Have fun with the collection database and maybe you tell us about your impressions?